I wrote a paper a couple of decades ago on different kinds of truth. I wrote the paper because most people see truth as statements about the material world that actually correspond to the real world. Philosophically, there are numerous theories of truth. The ones I am most familiar with are correspondence, coherence and pragmatic although there are others. You can Google Theories of Truth if you want to know more as I am not going to digress into that. I will say, for those interested, that I lean most heavily toward the pragmatic theory of truth.
Nonetheless, in the paper I just mentioned, I took a different direction on the ontology of truth. I pointed out that there are many kinds of truth including but not limited to: scientific truth, literary truth, and journalistic truth each of which has its own criteria for determining veracity. For example scientific method provides a means for establishing scientific truth. In order for a story to be true it must resonate with an individual's subjective experience of being human. So, this is the basis for literary truth. Journalistic truth has to do with checking sources and triangulating them. And so on. I also introduced another category of truth which I named (somewhat perversely) imaginary truth. I will come back to that later in this post. But, I need lay out some background first.
As I mentioned, most people see truth as statements about the material world that actually correspond to the real world. For example if I claim that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade, that is a true statement. If I say that water freezes at 100 degrees centigrade, then that is a false statement. Most people think of this example as the gold standard for truth. So, let's pick apart the gold standard before moving on to the silver and bronze standards.
Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade given several conditions. The water must be free of impurities. The device for measuring the temperature must be accurate. And, it must be boiled at sea level at a specific barometric pressure of 1 atmosphere. If you add impurities, have an inaccurate measuring device, or are conducting the test on Pike's Peak, the statement that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade is no longer true. So, this is not an absolute truth, it is a contingent truth. That is, it depends on the situation. Before leaving this example, let me point out that anyone who is stupid enough to jump into a vat of boiling water believing that it may not be 100 degrees centigrade will quickly go from idiot to boiled idiot. Often went we say that something is true, we really mean that it is true enough for our purposes.
My point here is that determining what is true and what is not true is a little trickier than one might imagine even in simplest of cases. Now let's look at some less simple cases. The example above is a truth from the physical sciences. They have rules for verifying truth. For example, you need to know why its true. In the case of the water, the heat excites the molecules until they get so excited that they escape from the water in the form of steam. Statement must also be falsifiable. You cannot say that water "likes" the heat as there is no way to prove or, more importantly, to disprove a statement like that. Finally, independent parties must be able verify the claim. I should be able to boil water with a thermometer and verify that it does boil at 100 degrees Celsius. So, this is the gold standard for truth.
Social sciences are a little different. The phenomenon under study does not have a physical presence. Instead concepts are created and studied. This complicates matters because you are not testing things; you are testing concepts you have constructed. While social sciences does attempt to draw validation from physical sciences such as fallibility and repeatability, the most important questions are: are the concepts designed correctly and are they useful in helping us understand social phenomena? So this is the silver standard for truth.
Moving to other areas where truth maters (the bronze standard) we can ask - what is truth in journalism; what is historical truth; or what is literary truth? Each of these has criteria for truth that is largely defined by the profession and I already touched on literary and journalistic truth. But, we can push this a little and ask what is engineering truth; what is aesthetic truth; or what is moral truth? I am not going to attempt to answer these because my goal here is only to assert that there are different kinds of truth and each has its own criteria for determining the truth status of an assertion made in that area.
This brings us back to the kind of truth which I call imaginary truth. An imaginary truth is a truth about a possible future. While a scientific truth is an assertion about the the material world and a literary truth is a truth about the human experience, an imaginary truth is an assertion about the future or an alternative world. The criteria for establishing an imaginary truth is that the assertion must be possible or believable and it must provide some insight into the target of the assertion.
Literary stories are held to the standard of literary truth while stories written to explore Possible Worlds are held to the standard of imaginary truth. The goal of these stories is not to explore aspects of the human condition as is the case for fiction. The goal is to explore possible consequences of current conditions projected into the future. And the source of the stories is not what has happened as is the case for non fiction. Rather the source is the imagination of the writer projecting possibilities into the future. So, it is neither fiction nor non fiction. It is a different kind of story that requires a new name, perhaps Imaginary Non Fiction. Yes, I like that. And it is a little perverse as well.
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